The House with a Clock in Its Walls

The House with a Clock in Its Walls is an intriguing magical title, based off a novel with the same name. Sure enough, it's a family fantasy surrounding mages, warlocks and their hidden world amongst the normal people. Visually, the film looked pleasing with warm vintage colors, backgrounded by suitable score. Camerawork was clear in capturing the well spent production design. But as far as the content is concerned, this was an ultimate first draft, basic film at best!

The overall approach to anything in this motion picture was solely literal. Be it uttering the dialogues, laying out expositions, revealing characters' relationships or even the book titles! You could clearly see for yourself there's no depth involved in the screenwriting here. It was as though the producers just greenlit every draft word on paper and rushed into giving it flesh and bone. Unsure if this was done purposely to dumb the material down for the targeted kid audiences, but you could rope in any of the first two Harry Potter silver screen adaptations and see the light years difference they have in comparison to The House with a Clock in Its Walls. A kids or family picture doesn't automatically become intelligent by including bombastic vocabs alone.

Worse, the writing was lazy too! There's no effort taken to even try communicating expositions in the most interesting way possible! Every two or three minutes, you're jammed with information-heavy scenes. Honestly, we didn't need most of it to understand this rudimentary of a film! Events happened just to facilitate a pre-destined ending. Whenever the screenwriters couldn't find a way to do so, they insert a dream sequence and dust off their hands. We could question so many of the proceedings here and here are some of it:

So what if the hidden clock was not found? What's the stake? How does the characters relate to it personally? These are invalid questions here. With plot revelations that made no sense and humor that fell flat plus awkward every single time, we didn't know a film about magic can be this dull and lackluster. There was one naughty little mystery surrounding Jonathan (Jack Black) and his true nature in the beginning. Once that was also explained in a laborious exposition, whatever anticipation left took off with the wind.

To be fair, the climax was somewhat interesting to watch. Despite the fact that we have yet another stereotypical villain who wants to end humanity for some goddamn reason fitting to his own logic, the end battle wasn't too bad for a popcorn shove. At least we got to see Jack Black in baby form, which was cute. Speaking of baby Jack Black, the CGI work was stellar - pumpkins, puppets and lion shaped leaf-tree were props well enhanced!